When a silver halide color photographic light-sensitive material is exposed and subjected to color development, a coupler is reacted with an oxidation product of an aromatic primary amine developing agent to form a color image. In such a photographic system, color reproduction is performed by a subtractive color process and in order to reproduce blue, green and red colors, yellow, magenta and cyan color images which are in a complementary relation, respectively, are formed. Among them, in order to form a cyan color image, a phenolic or naphtholic coupler is generally employed. However, a dye formed from such a coupler has an undesirable absorption in a green light region. Thus, the coupler causes a serious problem in that color reproducibility of the photographic material is remarkably deteriorated. It has been desired to solve such a problem.
In order to solve the problem, heterocyclic compounds are proposed to use as couplers as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,728,598 and 4,873,183 and European Patent 249453A2. However, these couplers have another serious problem in that the coupling activity thereof is poor. Pyrroloazoles are proposed to solve these problems in European Patent 491197A1. Although these compounds are superior to conventional couplers in view of the coupling activity and hue, further improvement has been desired.
On the other hand, methods of using additives to solve the above-described problems have been investigated in addition to the studies on structures of couplers per se. For instance, there are a technique for controlling hue by adding amide compounds or phenols as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,474,880, a technique for increasing color forming property by adding hydrogen-providing compounds having a hydrogen bond as described in JP-A-7-270990 (the term "JP-A" as used herein means an "unexamined published Japanese patent application"), and techniques for improving color reproducibility and color forming property by adding ureas and specific carboxylic acids as described in JP-A-6-258802 and JP-A-6-3782, respectively. However, the above-described problems have not yet been solved sufficiently according to these techniques. Therefore, investigations on the structure of pyrroloazole coupler, the incorporation of additive and a suitable combination thereof have still been made.
Particularly, a further technical development is necessary to sufficiently enjoy the characteristic of excellent hue of dyes formed from these couplers in photographic light-sensitive materials.